Foundational Digital Forensics Skills and Learning: Exemplifying Social Justice

This full paper reports on the curricular design and IRB-approved participant feedback of a digital forensics workshop curriculum to either be a standalone learning or experience or integrated within a forensics component of a cyber security course (e.g. Network Perimeter Security). The workshop showcases skills needed for foundational digital forensics (DFR) fieldwork and explains pedagogical techniques and successful environments for building inclusive classrooms that have been successful as reported by heterogeneous students. Forensics topics in the curriculum are be selected from the following areas found in our foundational digital forensics course: data acquisition; processing crime/incident scenes; information retrieval from Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems; recovering graphic, Word, Acrobat, and other file types; virtual machine forensics; investigating emails; examining social media data; writing investigation reports; studying the importance of ethics for expert witnesses; and, understanding expert testimony in digital investigations. The anticipated skills learned from the workshop are components of a full semester course which covers the basics for cybercrime and cyber-incidents to prepare students for interaction with law enforcement agencies, interaction with organizational forensic teams, and further digital forensic courses (e.g. Advanced Digital Forensics, Mobile Device Forensics, Incident Response, Malware Analysis, and Management of Digital Evidence).